The city of New York is in the midst of a landmark class-action lawsuit. The suit, Floyd v. the City of New York, alleges that the NYPD has routinely violated the Constitution by stopping and searching black and Latino New Yorkers based on their skin color. Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2002, stop-and-frisk increased by 600%, from 100,000 New Yorkers targeted to almost 685,000 in 2011. Nearly 90% of those stopped are black or Latino, and police are more likely to use force while stopping New Yorkers of color.

Grassroots community groups and national civil rights organizations have claimed for years that the NYPD’s aggressive tactics have inflicted too high a price on the “high-crime” areas affected. But the trial, expected to run well into May, has already presented some unbelievable revelations of police misconduct and abuse, with high-profile witnesses, including high-ranking NYPD officers, delivering gut-wrenching and shocking testimony. Here are five revelations from the trial.

1. Police are forced by their superiors to make up (illegal) quotas, encouraged to make bogus stops.

NYPD whistleblowers Pedro Serrano and Adhyl Polanco put their careers on the line when they secretly recorded supervisors demanding officers conduct a set amount of stops (five), summonses (20), and arrests (one) per month. Quotas for NYPD activity are illegal under New York labor law, but the city maintains that “performance standards” or “goals” that do not include punishments for officers who fail to meet them are perfectly legal. According to Polanco and Serrano, “performance standard” is just a euphemism for a quota forcing officers to meet numbers. Sometimes this requires them to break the law.

“We were handcuffing kids for no reason,” Polanco testified about the 41st Precinct in the Bronx. He said that supervisors questioning quantity “will never question the quality.” “They just want to make sure we have them. How we got them, they don’t really care about,” said Polanco.

In one of Polanco’s recordings, a supervisor says, “The goal is at least one arrest per month and 20 summons,” and an officer who fails to meet the quota may become a “Pizza Hut delivery man.”

“Things are not going to get any better. It is going to get a lot worse,” the supervisor says about numbers.

Polanco explained that superiors retaliated against officers who failed to meet or complained about quotas.

“They said, if we were willing to keep working with our partners, we better come up with the numbers; that if we want to ask for days off, we better come up with the numbers; that if we wanted overtime, the chiefs control the overtime, and that if we don’t do our numbers, we are not going to get it. We were told that it was non-negotiable, that they are going to force us to do it if we didn’t do it.”

“They can make your life very miserable,” he said.

2. NYPD cop admits to setting quotas.

Deputy Chief Michael Marino testified that when he became Commanding Officer of the 75th Precinct in 2002, he set “performance goals” or “standards” of 10 summonses and one arrest per month. When the judge asked, “So was there a performance goal of 10 summonses and one arrest?” Marino responded, “As per an administrative guide that was present at the time, I set the standards as was mandated to me by the police department, yes.”

Marino testified that upon entering the 75th Precinct, he learned that, “Surprisingly enough, the 400 or so officers assigned to patrol all saw exactly five summonses every month, no more, no less,” adding that “It told me that they had set their own quota.”

Marino testified that he did an analysis of crime conditions in the area and then, “I asked them to increase their summons production from five to 10. I asked them to try to make two good stops a month and to attempt to make one arrest a month.“

Still, he denied ever punishing officers solely for failing to meet his numbers.

3. Spinning evidence.

In 2007, the NYPD’s Office of Management Analysis and Planning (OMAP) commissioned a study by the RAND Corporation to determine whether the department’s stop-and-frisk tactic was driven by racial bias.

Given that close to 90% of police encounters involved non-whites, the report asked, “Do these statistics point to racial bias in police officers’ decisions to stop particular pedestrians? Do they indicate that officers are particularly intrusive when stopping nonwhites?”

In a summary of the report’s findings, RAND found, “small racial differences in these rates” based on which they made “communication, recordkeeping, and training recommendations to the NYPD for improving police-pedestrian interactions.”

That was the final report. But testimony at Thursday’s stop-and-frisk trial suggests that the NYPD pressured the reports’ authors to soften some of their original language. The project’s coordinator, Terry Riley, testified that in their contract the RAND Corporation agreed to take the NYPD’s concerns “into consideration.” The NYPD did indeed voice concerns about early drafts of the report, which plaintiffs say led to several alterations to the final product.

In the first draft, the report’s authors wrote of “disturbing evidence” that there was unequal treatment across race groups. After the NYPD objected to the language, that section was rewritten to say that there was “some evidence” of this. In another version of the report, they originally asked whether every stop that uncovered wrongdoing was worth stopping nine “innocent pedestrians.” The department apparently found the language offensive, and it was changed to “suspects who committed no crime.”

Darius Charney from the Center for Constitutional Rights,an attorney representing the plaintiffs, claims that the evidence they presented of emails complaining about these aspects of the report, and subsequent changes, show that the NYPD “clearly had a hand in spinning the results” even if they didn’t doctor the data.

4. Searching groins and socks…for guns?

Stop-and-frisk is supposed to get guns off the streets. Yet officers allegedly search areas where a gun cannot be reasonably hidden, and these searches are often the most invasive and humiliating.

There have been widespread allegations that NYPD frisks and searches go too far. As I recently reported, people have complained that police search their genital areas and buttocks for drugs, even though police are only allowed to search an area where they have observed a bulge and need to confirm it’s not a weapon.

A plaintiff in the case, 24-year-old Nicholas Peart, testified that, on two separate stops, officers searched him inappropriately. One day police demanded he and some relatives get down on the ground. He broke down when he described what happened next.

“They patted over my basketball shorts and I was touched,” he said, adding that they felt his groin.

In April 2011 Peart was on his way to pick up milk for his siblings. A police officer handcuffed him, removed his shoes and felt his socks, asking “if I had weed on me,” he said.

Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, an expert on stop-and-frisk, has linked the NYPD’s astonishing marijuana arrest rate to its use of stop-and-frisk. The NYPD arrests about 50,000 people annually for marijuana, the vast majority of them black or Latino and in the same neighborhoods where stop-and-frisk is prevalent. It’s telling that in 2012, after controversy surrounding stop-and-frisk heated up, both the policing tactic and marijuana arrests dropped by the same amount — 22% percent.

New York Senator Eric Adams (D-20th District) testified on April 1 that at a July 2010 meeting with Governor Andrew Cuomo about a bill (which he co-sponsored) to ban a database of persons stopped but not charged, he raised his concern about the “disproportionate” number of young black and Latino men stopped by police, prompting the Commissioner to say the tactic is crucial for controversial reasons. “[Commissioner Kelly] stated that he targeted or focused on that group because he wanted to instill fear in them, every time they leave their home, they could be stopped by the police,” Adams testified.

“I told him that I believe it was illegal and that that was not what stop-and-frisk was supposed to be used for,” he testified, adding that Kelly responded by asking, “How else are we going to get rid of guns?”

Adams later told reporters he considered Kelly’s statement evidence that, “It was not the people on the ground,” provoking illegal stops but “a policy being blessed from the top down.”

Kristen Gwynne is an associate editor and drug policy reporter at AlterNet.

Friday, April 15, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com

(NaturalNews) The medical police state is alive and well in Detroit today, whereChild Protective Services(CPS) called in the police to aid in their kidnapping of a 13-year-old daughter from an African American mother who refused to medicate her with dangerous psychiatric drugs. As this case is clearly showing, refusing to medicate your children with Big Pharma‘s mind-altering drugs is now being treated as a felony crime.

• Child Protective Services (CPS) personnel attempted to kidnap Maryanne’s 13-year-old daughter. They accused her of not giving her childpsychiatric medicationprescribed by her doctor.

• Maryanne says the medication causedside effectsin her daughter and made her condition worse, which is why she refused to give her daughter the medication.

• The medication wasRisperdal, a neuroleptic antipsychotic medication known for causing serious side effects such as abdominal pain, vomiting, aggression, anxiety, dizziness and lack of coordination (http://www.risperdalsideeffects.com).

What you are witnessing here with Maryanne Godboldo isthe tyranny of the medical police stateand the wicked criminality of Child Protective Services workers who are now front-line enforcers of Big Pharma’s deadly agenda to drug our children.

Make no mistake: What’s happening today is thatthe state is now breaking down the doors, assaulting, arresting and imprisoning parents who refuse to medicate their children. This is being accomplished with the use of armed force against innocent victims.

This unholy alliance between Big Pharma, CPS and the police has gone too far. It has becomethe weapon of medication compliance.

When medicine has become so dangerous, so forceful and so utterly harmful to the People that the state must use bullets and guns to force people to take it,you know it’s all gone way too far.

It makes you wonder: What kind of system of medicine is so bad that prescriptions have to beenforced at gunpoint?

That this is happening is not just an assault on Maryann Godboldo, butan assault on our rights and freedoms as sovereign human beings. Do we not have the right to say NO to a medication we don’t want our children to take? Do we not have the right to protect our children from kidnappers? Do we not have the right to use firearms in the defense and protection of our homes from armed invaders who are conspiring to kidnap our children?

The real criminals in this case are the CPS workers. They should be brought up on attempting kidnapping charges as well as a criminal conspiracy to commit kidnapping. The gun-toting cops who broke into Maryanne’s home and attempted to kidnap her daughter should be arrested and brought up on charges ofarmed robbery, breaking and entering and conspiracyto commit the felony crime of kidnapping.

And yet, instead, Maryanne is now facing multiple felony charges while the CPS criminals and cops who raided her home are charged with nothing.

Where is the justice in America today?How did medication become something to be enforced with bullets and SWAT teams? And more importantly,how far will this gobefore this tyranny ends?

Next, will they just line everybody up against a brick wall, and those who can’t produce a receipt for medication get a bullet in their heads?

Resistance is necessary to achieve freedom

I hope you see where this is headed. I’ve been warning you about this for years, urging you to resist the rise of the medical police state… warning you about what I called “gunpoint medicine” back in 2006 (http://www.naturalnews.com/019512.html).

Learn the truth or you will surely be crushed by it. Big Pharma will stop at nothing to force their drugs onto your children. They will use guns, SWAT teams, kidnapping, the breaking down of your front door… anything it takes!

And please, forward this article to everyone you know. Spread the word about reading NaturalNews.com to stay informed about health freedom. We must protect ourselves from thesemedication tyrantswho use kidnapping, armed assaults and the threat of violence to force us to drug our children.

The facts in those cases are not disputed, yet Miller has not been charged with a crime. However, he is being sued by Jason Anthony Graber, one of his victims. In light of Miller’s documented history of criminal violence, the plaintiff’s attorney has demanded that the assailant not be permitted to bring a firearm while being deposed.

The Department’s Operation Manual requires that officers be “armed at all times” — a provision that poses some interesting challenges for officers who choose to bathe, assuming that there are any who do. “Requiring a uniformed or non-uniformed police officer to disarm when he is compelled to give a deposition at an attorney’s office, or at any other unsecured location, presents a significant officer safety issue,” whines an affidavit provided by Lt. Dikran Kushdilian of the Denver PD.

Attorney David Lane, who is representing Graber, quite sensibly insists that some precautions must be taken in deposing people who are “defendants because they have acted illegally and violently toward others in the past.”

Lane demands that the deposition take place in a setting in which neither side is armed. Denver’s municipal government demands that the examination should take place at the federal Courthouse, where Miller and other officers in similar cases “would surrender their weapons to the custody of the U.S. Marshall [sic], and would be unarmed during the deposition.”

In other words, it’s not quite the case that Denver officers have to be “armed at all times”; the critical issue is the preservation of the government’s monopoly on the “legitimate” use of force in all circumstances. Lane should counter Denver’s demand by offering to permit Miller to carry his firearm to the deposition, while specifying that he and his associates would also be armed. The official response to that counter-proposal would be instructive.

Leading lambs to the slaughter: "Toy Gun Bash."

While Lane most likely wouldn’t choose that approach, he is sensible enough to recognize that the State’s agents of armed coercion are the most dangerous element in society, and prudent enough to act on that understanding.

Owing to the tireless efforts of the organs of official indoctrination, a large portion of the public assumes that the opposite is true, and as a result can be easily convinced that only those commissioned to commit violence on behalf of government can be entrusted with the means to do so.

A splendid example of this deadly agitprop is offered by the “Toy Gun Bash,” which was first inflicted on Providence, Rhode Island seven years ago by the criminal clique running the municipal government.

`

Each year around Christmastime, children living in Providence are compelled to line up and feed their toy guns into the maw of the “Bash-O-Matic,” a device described by theBoston Globe as “a large, black, foam creature with churning metal teeth and the shape of a cockroach spliced with a frog.” In exchange for feeding their toy guns into this recombinant monstrosity, each child is given a substitute toy that is deemed to be suitably “non-violent.” They are also forced to endure a harangue regarding “the dangers of playing with guns, real or fake.”

Maintaining the monopoly: Burning confiscated guns.

The Providence event, continues the Globe, is “a version of the gun buyback program in which adults trade firearms for gift certificates.”

In fact, gun “buyback” programs are a form of what Dr. Edward J. Laurance of the UN’s Register of Conventional Arms calls “micro-disarmament” — or, more to the point, civiliandisarmament.

The expression “buyback” assumes that government has a monopoly on the use of force, and that only duly authorized agents of officially sanctioned violence should be permitted to own guns and other weapons — and thus the State is taking back from Mundanes a privilege to which they’re not entitled.

Gun “buyback” and turn-in programs are a common feature of military occupations, both here and abroad. U.S. military personnel in Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, Iraq, and Afghanistan have employed that tactic (as David Kramer notes, this helps the occupiers to acquire a useful hoard of “drop guns” that can be used to frame innocent people as “terrorists” or “insurgents”). The same approach was used to disarm American Indians as they were cattle-penned on reservations.

Over the past decade, UN-aligned activists in several countries have staged events in which guns confiscated from civilians have been destroyed, a ritual sometimes called the “Bonfire of the Liberties.” This is in keeping with UN-promoted dogma (expressed most forcefully in its 2000 agitprop film Armed to the Teeth) that the only “legal” weapons are those “used by armies and police forces to protect us,” and that civilian ownership of firearms is “illegitimate.”

Annan was actually an accessory before the fact to that genocide: Informed in early 1994 of the impending slaughter by Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian officer commanding UN peacekeeping troops, Annan ordered Dallaire to pass along his intelligence to the same government that was planning the massacre.

Dallaire, who had been ordered to disarm the future victims, was ordered not to raid the government arms caches that were later used to carry out the murder rampage.

Most of the killing was carried out by machete-wielding mobs acting as government subcontractors. But it would have been impossible to butcher hundreds of thousands ofarmed people, nor would the mobs have been able to round up and annihilate the targeted population without the active support provided by the regime’s armies and police forces — you know, the armed agents of state violence who were there to “protect” those who were hacked to pieces.

Children should learn what happened in places like Germany, Cambodia, and Rwanda(as well as places like Sand Creek and Wounded Knee) when people willingly surrendered their guns to their rulers — but a government school classroom is no place for lessons of that kind.

One of the cases used to promote the Toy Gun Bash in Providence actually underscores the reliably fatal consequences of a government monopoly on force. The Globe points out that as children were herded toward the Bash-O-Matic, they were told the cautionary tale “of a 14-year-old boy who police nearly shot after they confused his air pistol with a real gun.” For rational people, this incident illustrates the compelling need to disarm the police, rather than swipe toys from innocent children.

Those who insist that religion has no place in the government-run school system aren’t paying attention: The entire purpose of “public” education is to catechize youngsters in the worship of the Divine State. Rituals like Providence’s Toy Gun Bash serve a sacramental function; they are the equivalent of a child’s first communion in the government-sponsored church of collectivist self-destruction.

While the little lambs are taught to be docile, submissive sheeple, the Regime is honing the lupine instincts of those supposedly tasked to protect them.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal recently described how recruits at the Metropolitan Police Department Academy are indoctrinated into perceiving the world as a 360 degree battlefield, where they are perpetually under siege and should be prepared to employ lethal force without hesitation.

“When you put that badge on, there are people who want to kill you,” intoned Officer Wil Germonsen, who — like a large and growing number of local police officers, has a military background.

“After some time on the street, the recruits will never see the world the same way. They’ll always be on guard — carrying a gun on duty and off, checking out fellow shoppers at the grocery store, thinking about those worst-case scenarios while having dinner with the family. It’s like a switch that flips on and never turns off….”

“I believe every single recruit here, when they put that badge on, they are warriors,” insists Germonsen. “We’re fighting a war.”

What this means, of course, is that the state-created armed tribe to which Germonsen belongs is an army of occupation — primed to kill, given broad discretion in the use of lethal force, and trained to consider all of us who don’t belong to their tribe as potentially lethal enemies. Some way had better be found — and pretty damned soon — to de-fang those wolves in sheepdog disguise. Meanwhile, it would be wise to do what we can to avoid placing ourselves at a potentially fatal disadvantage when dealing with those who belong to the Brotherhood of Sanctified Violence.

UPDATE: Bringing the War Home

“Many law enforcement officers called up to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan are finding it difficult to readjust to their jobs once home, bringing back heightened survival instincts that may make them quicker to use force and showing less patience toward the people they serve,” reports the AP.

A report compiled last year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance “warns that the blurring of the line between combat and confrontations with criminal suspects at home may result in `inappropriate decisions and actions — particularly in the use of … force. This similarity … could result in injury or death to an innocent civilian.'”

The Imperial Military makes increasing use of Guardsmen and Reservists whose “civilian” job is domestic law enforcement, and domestic police agencies increasingly recruit from the ranks of combat veterans. As noted above, police recruits are being trained to consider themselves “warriors” on a battlefield, rather than peace officers. We really should dispense with the illusion that contemporary law enforcement is anything other than the domestic branch of a seamlessly integrated military apparatus.(h/t The Agitator.)

Second Update: Seattle as a Battlefront

Courtesy of commenter QB we see the following video of 27-year-old Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk gunning down John T. Williams, an artisan who was carrying a carving knife and a block of wood. No more than four seconds pass between Birk’s demand (it wasn’t a lawful order, because Williams was threatening no one) that he drop the knife, and the first of several gunshots fired by the officer. The entire encounter lasted roughly eight seconds.

Williams had a troubled past, but was not known to be violent. He had some emotional problems and, most importantly, was functionally deaf — which meant that he couldn’t hear the demand that he drop his knife — which was closed when photographed by crime scene investigators, despite Birk’s claim that it was open at the time of the shooting.

A peace officer in this situation would have taken at least a little more time to resolve the situation without drawing his gun, let alone discharging it. But, as we’ve seen on numerous occasions, contemporary law enforcement officers are on a war footing, which means that their default setting is “overkill.”

It’s worth noting that one of the officers who responded to Birk’s “shots fired” report tells him that he did the “right thing” — even though the official review subsequently ruled that the shooting wasn’t justified.

This is the message that was given to Cheyenne Irish, the newborn daughter of New Hampshire residents Jonathan Irish and Stephanie Taylor, who was literally stolen from her parents hours after her birth on October 6.

While there are reportedly some “very serious” criminal allegations involved in this matter, the focal point of the case should be this: Among the reasons cited by New Hampshire’s child “protection” directorate as supposed justification for the seizure of Cheyenne was the fact that “Mr. Irish associated with a militia known as the, [sic] `Oath Keepers,’ and had purchased several different types of weapons including a rifle, handgun and taser.”

“Whether or not the charges against Mr. Irish are true, this action is entirely unconstitutional and represents a very dangerous precedent,” Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, a practicing defense attorney, pointed out to Pro Libertate. “Using this man’s political views and alleged affiliations to define parental suitability in any way is entirely illegitimate, and a direct threat to the rights of parents who are political activists of any kind.”

This is hardly the first time law enforcement officials and social workers have cited “political extremism” to justify severe and extra-constitutional sanctions against people who have not been convicted of an actual crime.

Those unsanctioned opinions, coupled with legal firearms purchases, led to Girard’s arrest and detention as a “danger to the community” — but he was never formally charged or prosecuted. He was simply taken into Soviet-style administrative detention while the local members of Lavrenti Beria’s fraternity — that is, the county prosecutor and judge — tried to devise a criminal charge to justify his imprisonment.

Political Prisoner Gregory Girard

After Girard spent four months in jail without a criminal charge, his case was eventually “dismissed without a finding.” He was designated a “ward of the court,” compelled to undergo routine psychiatric evaluation and treatment, and notified that he could be arrested and subjected to indefinite detention at any time such action was deemed suitable by his persecutors.

This was done to Girard because he was classified to be what law enforcement organs in the Soviet Union called a “socially dangerous person.” This same calculus appears to have been used to justify the government kidnapping of Cheyenne Irish — a much graver crime, given that it involved not merely the seizure of a man’s means of self-defense, but of his newborn child.

Cheyenne “wasn’t even 16 hours old when they came in and stole her from us,” reports her father Jonathan. The head of security at Concord Hospital “had a nurse come in while Cheyenne was sleeping [who] lied to us that they just wanted to take her to the nursery to see the doctor to be discharged. Even though I said NO to have the doctor come in the room they took her anyway…. I followed [them] out to the nursery because I didn’t want my daughter out of my sight, as we were walking out I saw several gentlemen wearing suits with detective badges and my gut just started wrenching.”

“They rushed her into the nursery and locked her in,” Jonathan continues. “[W]hile I was talking to one of the other nurses the head of security comes up behind me, grabs my arm and starts walking me down the hall saying `you need to keep an open mind, you need to just hear them out’ and he just kept repeating himself ignoring my questions as to who ‘they’ were.”

Cheyenne, shortly before her abduction.

How typical of an agent of government aggression to be accusing the victim of “intolerance” even as the crime is in progress. This little touch is a variation on the police tactic of bellowing “Stop resisting!” to a helpless victim at the bottom of a thugswarm.

“When he got me in Stephanie’s hospital room and sat me down on the couch the police department and DCYF [Division of Children, Youth and Family services — that is, the child-snatcher apparat] showed up. Three uniformed patrol officers and 3-4 detectives with 2 DCYF social workers walked in the room…. [One] of the patrolmen asked if he could pat me down. I said NO, not giving my consent…. The officer grabbed my wrist, bent it behind my back and stood me up and proceeded to pat me down anyway.”

After seizing a pocketknife and cigarette lighter and asking if Jonathan had “any other weapons” — officer safety uber alles, you know — the childnappers “gave us a fabricated affidavit … telling us they were taking custody of our newborn daughter.”

Jonathan was then informed that he would be shadowed, Stasi-style, by a “security officer.” When contacted by Pro Libertate at approximately 3:45 MST on October 8, Mr. Irish was being forced to leave the Concord Hospital parking lot pursuant to a “notice” he had been sent by the local police.

“I received a phone call a while ago telling me to go to a website” — that is, a Facebook page — “where a group of people had taken it on themselves to organize a protest and rally,” Irish recounted to Pro Libertate. “I was then sent a document by the Concord Police that said I wouldn’t be allowed to go inside the hospital, or even be in the parking lot, unless it involved a medical emergency, otherwise it would be considered ‘criminal trespass.’”

Irish refers to Cheyenne’s mother, Stephanie Taylor, as his fiancee. The affidavit mentions that the couple had been under DCYF scrutiny “for approximately 21 months … in a case involving two children of Stephanie Taylor; neglect petitions were filed on January 7, 2009 and a Termination of Parental Rights trial was recently concluded as to these two children….”

For reasons not specified in the document, Irish was “ordered to attend Ending the Violence with Scott Hampton; however, to date, has not completed this program.” (Remember this point; we’ll return to it anon.) The police complain that they have “responded to multiple calls” involving Irish and firearms, which resulted in “a pending charge for possession of a concealed weapon without a permit.” It was in the context of that trivial paperwork matter that the affidavit mentioned Irish’s “association” with the Oath Keepers, which was misrepresented in the affidavit as a “militia.”

The Oath Keepers is an organization of current and retired law enforcement and military personnel who have pledged not to carry out patently unconstitutional orders. The group’s founder, Stewart Rhodes, emphasizes that it encourages lawful, peaceful non-cooperation, rather than armed insurrection, as a way of interposing against the all-encompassing criminal assault by the Regime against individual rights.

Had an Oath Keeper been present at Concord Hospital on October 6, he would have refused to be party to the criminal abduction of Cheyenne Irish.

The “association” referred to in that document consists of occasional involvement by Irish and his fiancee in an on-line discussion group involving the Oath Keepers. Mentioning this tenuous connection served the immediate interests of the child abduction bureaucracy, since it created a caricature of the father as a potentially dangerous “extremist.” But it also serves the long-term interest of the Homeland Security bureaucracy by using Jonathan Irish as an indispensable defendant in a potentially precedent-setting case.

“I know practically nothing about Jonathan Irish,” Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers told Pro Libertate. “Whatever we learn about his problems, the real question is this: Why was such prominent mention made of his political beliefs and supposed affiliations?”

If Mr. Irish is a legitimate criminal suspect — as opposed to a troubled parent who is considered a political criminal — why wasn’t he taken into custody? Why was he left relatively free, while his newborn daughter was wrenched from her mother and father through deliberate deception and the threat of lethal force?

The Oath Keepers have been targeted by the so-called Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an immensely profitable leftist “watchdog” group run by the degenerate fraud named Morris Dees. Through an illicit relationship with law enforcement agencies, both federal and local, the SPLC has become deeply involved in an effort to indoctrinate police (as well as educators and social workers) regarding the ubiquitous menace of “anti-government extremism.” Rhodes points out that the SPLC, a nominally private group that is unaccountable to the public, is a member of the “Homeland Security Advisory Council” (HSAC) which published a report on domestic “radicalization” and “extremism” last Spring.

A work in progress, the HSAC describes itself as striving to prevent “violent crime that is motivated by extreme ideological beliefs” through “threat mitigation” and “community policing.” That last term of art came into vogue during the early part of Bill Clinton’s first term: Washington began to lavish funding on states and municipalities for the purpose of integrating the police with the social services bureaucracy, the better to create a seamless web from which no family could escape.

"Community policing"; below, more of the same.

Before she presided over the Holocaust at Mt. Carmel as the federal Attorney General, Janet Reno was a forceful advocate of “community policing” in order to draw recalcitrant parents into the suffocating embrace of the omniprovident Nanny State.

“They sit behind doors and they glare out at officialdom in whatever its form — a building inspector, a Housing and Urban Development manager, a police officer — and they don’t believe that person,” complained Reno in a 1993 speech to the Police Foundation. “They won’t come out. They won’t bring their child to the clinic … because they are suspicious and unbelieving that government really cares.”

That speech, incidentally, was given on April 9, 1993 — just ten days before the government Reno served so eagerly displayed its “caring” nature by immolating the children of the Branch Davidian community.

Reno, according to a Los Angeles Times summary, urged that local governments assemble teams of “community-friendly, highly respected police officers, social workers, public health nurses, [and] community organizers” to pry open the doors of people burdened with a healthy mistrust of the congealed mass of corruption called government.

Elian Gonzalez Reno-style "community policing" strike force.

The group that carried out the abduction of Cheyenne Irish is a perfect example of a Reno-style “community policing” strike force in action.

Among the reasons cited for seizing Cheyenne was Scott Irish’s refusal to attend a seminar taught by Dr. Scott Hampton, Director of an organization called Ending The Violence. Hampton and his organization offer “training and consultation … to child protective workers, probation and parole officers, judges, attorneys, medical professionals, clergy, teachers, and law enforcement” as well as offering “expert witness testimony in both civil and criminal cases.” Hampton has conducted hundreds of workshops and seminars throughout North America and Europe, and is past President of the National Supervised Visitation Network.

Most importantly, he is an unabashed proponent of totalitarian attitude reconstruction, the sort of social engineer C.S. Lewis referred to as an “official straightener.” Although he eagerly cites the work of “tolerance” peddlers such as Morris Dees, Hampton believes that tolerance is inadequate. Unlike those who believe that only God has jurisdiction over the inner life of human beings, Hampton — like others who would use the power of the State to tear windows into men’s souls — maintains thatthe government literally must reprogram the inner life of people who hold “bigoted” beliefs.

“Tolerance does not require that you give up your hatred. It just tells you how to act when you hate. Not good enough,” sniffs Hampton in his new book Tolerant Oppression. “It is time that we teach people how not to hate.” What this requires, of course, is court-ordered reconstruction of individual attitudes using whatever leverage may be necessary — apparently up to and including child abduction.

Like Jonathan Irish, Baltazar Cruz was deemed an unsuitable parent on the basis of unproven allegations. An employee at a local Chinese restaurant, she had reportedly come to the United States as an illegal immigrant, and was accused of “trading sex for housing.” Her immigration status would not justify the seizure of her child, and the prostitution charge was never investigated. Nevertheless, it took more than a year and a half for Baltazar Cruz — working with a self-described “public interest law firm” — to regain custody of her stolen child.

A federal lawsuit filed against the hospital and others responsible for this atrocity correctly condemns the “unconstitutional actions” of those who abducted Baltazar Cruz’s child. Their unconscionable acts inflicted severe emotional and physical harm on the bereaved mother, alienated the newborn from parental affection, and “substantially interfered with [their] constitutionally protected right to family integrity,” the lawsuit observes.

Exactly the same case can be made on behalf of Jonathan Irish, Stephanie Taylor, and their daughter Cheyenne. It’s not likely, however, that the legal activist group that defended the parental rights of Cirila Baltazar Cruz — the Southern Poverty Law Center — will volunteer its services on behalf of Cheyenne and her parents, given that organization’s distant but substantive role in the crime that was committed against them.

If you ever fell victim to the prejudice that people today are smarter and more intellectually sophisticated than the people of the 1st or 13th centuries, you need only ask your friends and neighbors about the terrifying word “anarchy” to prove to yourself that our generations are just as stupid and foolish as any others. Even mentioning the word with a straight face is bound to put your acquaintances on edge, which is remarkable in itself. But, once they recover their senses from hearing the word pronounced out loud without a clap of thunder following on its heels, they will usually offer an argument against anarchism that rivals in its sheer stupidity any arguments that the flat-Earthers ever gave in antiquity.

It usually goes something like this: Human nature is so intrinsically evil and depraved that, without cops walking the streets, judges locking up potheads, and politicians buying hookers and crack in Washington, the entire world would devolve into a horrifying bloodbath. Murder and rape would run rampant as soon as the “criminals,” (that is, all of us, as per our shared evil nature), got word that the police were no longer in the business of shooting, beating and incarcerating them. Virtually everyone and everything would be killed or destroyed in the ensuing mayhem. Cannibalism would probably even reappear for the barbaric survivors of the initial anarchic bloodbath. That’s right, cannibalism.

So, as you can clearly see, the fragile fabric of society is held together ultimately by the simple police officer, whom we all take for granted, and whose life is spent deterring the innumerable “criminals” out there from butchering one another, like you and me. Without police officers, given human nature’s intrinsic depravity, life would indeed be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

The sheer stupidity of arguments along the lines that human nature is so totally depraved that society would devolve into cruel chaos in the absence of police officers is almost difficult to fathom. One can forgive the flat-Earthers of yesterday for not being gifted enough in astronomy and mathematics to determine that the giant hunk of rock they stood on is spherical, but how can one forgive the people of today for thinking that that guy wearing blue polyester with mustard in his mustache in the corner of the deli is the very linchpin of human society? How can one forgive an intellectual error as large as the one that presumes that you and I would probably fight each other to the death if it wasn’t for that woman with a mullet and a radar gun under the highway overpass? How will future generations be able to comprehend an intellectual error as large as the one that holds that our very lives and our entire civilization hang oh-so tenuously from a 56-inch braided duty belt?

If our lives and fortunes were indeed dependent upon protection from a handful of people swaddled in hideous blue polyester, mankind would have long ago lost them. If human nature were truly as depraved as these arguments would have us believe, then the chubby blue line would long ago have been annihilated by its vastly numerically superior criminal adversaries. No “criminal” worth the name would be deterred from committing his favored atrocities by a small group of lightly-armed fat people, whose national reputation is tied inextricably to the donut. To even suggest that this 300 million-strong horde of savage, would-be criminals are kept at bay only by some irrational fear of blue polyester is so asinine that it makes the flat-Earthers look like geniuses by comparison.

This intellectual error is all the more inexcusable in America, where the population is armed to the teeth with high-powered rifles, pistols, and shotguns. If the American population were truly as depraved as this argument would have us believe all people are, then its bloodlust could hardly be contained by a few pudgy men and women carrying small caliber pistols. The thought is as laughable as would be an argument to the effect that the hardened and rifle-toting farmers of Mayberry were deterred from slaughtering one another by Andy Griffith and his slow-witted sidekick.

There are some intellectual errors that one can excuse, or at least understand. The people of antiquity could not see that the Earth was round, so one can understand that they did not grasp that seemingly obvious truth There are other intellectual errors, however, that are so idiotic and so self-evident that they smash to pieces any sense of superiority we might be foolish enough to entertain over other peoples. Such is the magnitude of the error of dismissing the sublime idea of free-market anarchism by assuming that the geniuses in blue keep us savages from killing each other.

“He made me do my job,” insisted Bryan Yant when asked to explain why he gunned down 21-year-old Las Vegas resident Trevon Cole last June in what was clearly an act of criminal homicide.

Yant, who is employed by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police as an undercover counter-narcotics detective, claimed that Cole – who was accused of selling 1.8 ounces of marijuana – “made an aggressive act toward me,” which was “enough to make me fear for my life.”

Cole’s fiancée, Sequoia Pearce, offers a much different story. She maintains that Cole was cooperative, putting up his hands and saying “All right – all right” in the instant before Yant fatally shot him. At the time, Pearce – who was nine months pregnant with the couple’s child – was kneeling on the floor with a gun to her head.

Of the six-member narcotics squad involved in the late evening raid on the tiny one-bedroom apartment, Yant was the only one who claimed that Cole made a “furtive movement.” Interestingly, he was also the only one carrying an assault rifle.

On three separate occasions in the weeks leading up to the June 11 raid, police “arranged to meet with Trevon in the parking lot of his apartment complex” to conduct drug buys, attorney Andre Lagomarsino told Pro Libertate. “Trevon was never armed or dangerous, and he wasn’t exactly a high-rolling dealer either, given the fact that he didn’t even have a car.”

In the hours leading up to the raid, “the police had the apartment under surveillance, and they knew that there was a pregnant woman in that room,” continues Lagomarsino. “They had already established that this guy wasn’t a threat. They had probable cause to arrest Trevon; why didn’t they simply arrange to meet him in the parking lot and cuff him, and then execute a search?”

Although the police – with the help of a camera crew from Langley Productions, which produces the execrable COPS “reality TV” series – had captured Trevon Cole selling marijuana on video, the affidavit Yant filed to obtain an arrest warrant was fatally flawed. (Remember the COPS connection; we’ll return to it anon.)

Yant misidentified the Las Vegas resident as another individual – a Houston resident with a lengthy criminal record. The two men – who had different birthdays and middle names – looked nothing like each other. Trevon, a former college football player, was roughly 100 pounds heavier and three inches taller than the individual described in the affidavit.

It’s impossible to dismiss Yant’s misrepresentation as an innocent mistake. He had all the necessary information from Cole’s California driver’s license. Rather than correctly describing the subject as a young man with no prior criminal record, Yant depicted him as a dangerous repeat offender. This, in turn, prompted a judge to approve Yant’s request for an armed, night-time raid on Cole’s apartment. Res ipsa loquitir.

When the cops invaded Cole’s apartment, the lights were out and a television offered the only illumination. In defiance of protocol, Yant – acting without backup – kicked in the bathroom door. He found Cole squatting in front of the toilet, apparently trying to dispose of a minuscule amount of marijuana.

According to the story Yant told the inquest, Cole “turned towards me, rotated his body,” and assumed a shooter’s stance. The detective was supposedly able to see all of this despite the fact that it was dark and the barrel-mounted flashlight on his rifle wasn’t working.

That account can’t be reconciled with the findings of Dr. Lisa Gavin, a medical examiner with the Clark County Coroner’s Office, who said that the physical evidence shows Cole was facing away from Yant when he was fatally shot. The bullet that killed Cole followed a downward trajectory through his cheek into his neck.

During the inquest, Assistant District Attorney Chris Owens suggested that this was “consistent” with an accidental discharge of Yant’s rifle as he kicked in the door. However, Pearce insists that Cole had sufficient time to raise his hands and signal his compliance before Yant gunned him down. Her account actually confirms Yant’s testimony that the gunshot was a deliberate act, not an accidental discharge.

When coupled with forensic evidence indicating that Cole was shot from behind, this looks suspiciously like an execution-style murder – or at the very least, something that should be prosecuted as an act of criminal homicide. Thanks to a system designed to validate questionable use of lethal force by police, Yant may conceivably lose his job, but he won’t be put on trial.

Lagomarsino observes that no cross-examination of police officers is permitted. “We were allowed to submit written questions, one at a time, to the prosecutor, but we couldn’t cross-examine Yant” or even ask follow-up questions, he told Pro Libertate. The prosecutors don’t bother to present a summation for the jury, and established procedures also permit judges to offer what Lagomarsino called “very vague” instructions to the jury.

Additionally, jury nullification would avail little in this setting, since the inquest – unlike a grand jury – cannot return an indictment. At the end of the inquest into the Trevon Cole shooting, comments Don Chairez, it appeared that the judge “was almost asking for a directed verdict.”

This wasn’t the first time a coroner’s inquest has rescued Bryan Yant. In 2002, Yant, at the time a 25-year-old street officer, shot robbery suspect Richard Travis Brown following a foot pursuit. Yant claimed that he had returned fire after Brown shot at him during the chase. Eventually Brown “buckled and fell face-first on the ground,” Yant told the inquest. Sprawled on the ground with a “wild-eyed look,” Brown supposedly pointed his gun at the officer, who unloaded the volley that killed him.

An Open Letter to Politicians

Whenever revolutionary change appears in the world, whether for good or for ill, there are always certain groups of people who fail or refuse to recognize how much things have truly changed. One can find many examples of this phenomenon in the business world, when entrepreneurs who fail to appreciate new market conditions get tossed aside by their competitors before they even know what hit them. By the time they realize that they have made serious forecasting errors, it is often far too late for them to catch up. Similar examples abound in the academic and athletic worlds, where scholars and coaches who fail to appreciate radically new conditions in their disciplines or sports find themselves quickly surpassed by their rivals and colleagues.

A similar situation appears in the realm of law enforcement in the United States, because police officers and their political bosses seem to be oblivious to the fact that the American economic and political landscape has profoundly changed over the last three years. They continue to humiliate, bully, assault, taser, jail, and shoot Americans (and their dogs) as though the American populace will forever tolerate such abuses. Police officers strut around cities and towns barking orders at people as though nothing in the world could ever take away their ability to intimidate and demean. Similarly, politicians and police chiefs continue to defend their officers’ actions, no matter how barbarically or blatantly they may have misbehaved.

In so doing, these police officers and politicians are demonstrating their inability or refusal to recognize how much America has changed.

It is important for these police officers to quickly recognize that the United States is no longer populated primarily with happy, rich people unconcerned with the world outside their new houses and cars. All of that was washed away in the explosion of the Federal Reserve’s credit bubbles, beginning in 2007. Now, Americans have been finally forced to recognize that they are not even close to being as rich or as happy as they thought they were. Many have lost their homes, and still more will lose their homes. Many have lost their jobs, and still more will lose their jobs. Many have found that their college educations are worthless, and still more will learn this lesson. Many have lost a son or a brother or a husband in a pointless war, and still more will lose their husbands, fathers, and sons. Many have lost their life savings, and so will many more. In other words, a huge and growing number of Americans are homeless, jobless, fatherless, poor, and angry. They have a lot less to lose than they did before. These are not people amenable to being humiliated, bullied, assaulted, tasered, or shot.

Americans are not in the mood for this kind of shit right now.

The effects of the actions of brazen and clueless police officers are compounded by the fact that there are not that many of them in the United States relative to the rest of the population. There’s a reason they are referred to as the thin blue line. As such, they must recognize the revolutionary changes that have occurred over the past three years, and not provoke a group of people that far, far outnumbers them. It was one thing for police officers to beat and shoot Americans when the vast majority of them were too distracted by their new houses and IKEA furniture to notice, but all of the distractions are now gone, and many of these people are angry and devoid of hope. There must not be violence from “ordinary” Americans, who are, after all, armed, nor against them.

Police officers need to shed their arrogant self-assurance that the American people will always tolerate being humiliated, beaten, assaulted, tasered, or shot by a tiny group of people with badges. There is a breaking point for all people, and it is foolish beyond belief to toy with that breakingpoint. Police officers, stop courting disaster for America. Join the civilized world where we don’t humiliate, beat, assault, taser, and shoot other human beings.

Liberty Stickers

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